Netflix’ CDN announcement and the operator video delivery landscape

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

News broke out on Monday of Netflix rolling out their own content delivery network (CDN). As Dan Rayburn wrote in his latest blog post, this is not really a new trend in the market. Nonetheless, Netflix’ venture into building its own CDN signifies the immediacy of the economic challenge of transferring video streams online at high quality. This topic came up in every conversation we have had with both network operators and content providers over the past 12 months. It seems that the problem will keep escalating as consumers are presented with easier options to consume video content online, and the quality of content continues to improve.

To truly address the root cause, the network infrastructure should have the necessary smarts to identify all the popular video content being consumed and deliver it at close proximity to the subscribers from the edge of the network. This would establish a universal video delivery layer that would horizontally address the video delivery challenge. The operators’ alternative is to deploy multiple vertical solutions from different content providers and CDNs, often times architected for data center environments rather than strict carrier-grade requirements, and rather complex to deploy, integrate, and manage. Qwilt is one of a handful of vendors trying to establish a universal network intelligence and delivery solution.

Our QB-Series products were architected to address this challenge across the board – helping both operators and content providers simultaneously. Engineered from the ground up to be universal, our products allow carriers to serve all types of video content coming from all content sources, Netflix as well as others, from the subscriber edge using a single, integrated solution. The unified platform solution results in optimized space, power, and maintenance requirements perfectly suited for “deep” subscriber edge deployments. At the same time it offers a great complementary value to content provider and CDNs alike, extending the video delivery capabilities closer to the subscribers, while enabling all entities operators, content providers and CDNs alike to maximize the return on investment in their existing infrastructure.